Mercurythe innermost planet of the solar system and the eighth in size and mass. Its closeness to the Sun and its smallness make it the most elusive of the planets visible to the unaided eye. Because its rising or setting is always within about two hours of the Sun’s, it is never observable when the sky is fully dark. Mercury is designated by the symbol ☿.

The difficulty in seeing it notwithstanding, Mercury was known at least by Sumerian times, some 5,000 years ago. In Classical Greece it was called Apollo when it appeared as a morning star just before sunrise and Hermes, the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Mercury, when it appeared as an evening star just after sunset. Hermes was the swift messenger of the gods, and the planet’s name is thus likely a reference to its rapid motions relative to other objects in the sky. Even in more recent eras, many sky observers passed their entire lifetimes without ever seeing Mercury. It is reputed that Nicolaus Copernicus, whose heliocentric model of the heavens in the 16th century explained why Mercury and Venus always appear in close proximity to the Sun, expressed a deathbed regret that he had never set eyes on the planet Mercury himself.

Until the last part of the 20th century, Mercury was one of the least-understood planets, and even now the shortage of information about it leaves many basic questions unsettled. Indeed, the length of its day was not determined until the 1960s, and, even after the flybys of the Mariner 10 and Messenger (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) probes, the surface of the planet had not been completely observed. At first glance the portion of the planet that has been imaged looks similar to the cratered terrain of the Moon, an impression reinforced by the roughly comparable size of the two bodies. Mercury is far denser, however, having a metallic core that takes up about 61 percent of its volume (compared with 4 percent for the Moon and 16 percent for Earth). Moreover, its surface shows significant differences from lunar terrain, including a lack of the massive dark-coloured lava flows known as maria on the Moon and the presence of buckles and scarps that suggest Mercury actually shrank during some period in its history. Mercury’s nearness to the Sun has given scientists bound to Earth many observational hurdles, which are now being overcome by the spacecraft missions of Messenger. Messenger was launched in 2004, flew past the planet twice in 2008 and once in 2009, and settled into orbit in 2011. Mercury’s proximity to the Sun has also been exploited to confirm predictions made by relativity theory about the way gravity affects space and time.

Basic astronomical data

Mercury is an extreme planet in several respects. Because of its nearness to the Sun—its average orbital distance is 58 million km (36 million miles)—it has the shortest year (a revolution period of 88 days) and receives the most intense solar radiation of all the planets. With a radius of about 2,440 km (1,516 miles), Mercury is the smallest major planet, smaller even than Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, or Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. In addition, Mercury is unusually dense. Although its mean density is roughly that of Earth’s, it has less mass and so is less compressed by its own gravity; when corrected for self-compression, Mercury’s density is the highest of any planet. Nearly two-thirds of Mercury’s mass is contained in its largely iron core, which extends from the planet’s centre to a radius of about 2,100 km (1,300 miles), or about 85 percent of the way to its surface. The planet’s rocky outer shell—its surface crust and underlying mantle—is only some 300 km (200 miles) thick. For additional orbital and physical data, see the table.

Observational challenges

As seen from Earth’s surface, Mercury hides in dusk and twilight, never getting more than about 28° in angular distance from the Sun. It takes about 116 days for successive elongations—i.e., for Mercury to return to the same point relative to the Sun—in the morning or evening sky; this is called Mercury’s synodic period. Its nearness to the horizon also means that Mercury is always seen through more of Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, which blurs the view. Even above the atmosphere, orbiting observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope are restricted by the high sensitivity of their instruments from pointing as close to the Sun as would be required for observing Mercury. Because Mercury’s orbit lies within Earth’s, it occasionally passes directly between Earth and the Sun. This event, in which the planet can be observed telescopically or by spacecraft instruments as a small black dot crossing the bright solar disk, is called a transit (see eclipse), and it occurs about a dozen times in a century.

Mercury also presents difficulties to study by space probe. Because the planet is located deep in the Sun’s gravity field, a great deal of energy is needed to shape the trajectory of a spacecraft to get it from Earth’s orbit to Mercury’s in such a way that it can go into orbit around the planet or land on it. The first spacecraft to visit Mercury, Mariner 10, was in orbit around the Sun when it made three brief flybys of the planet in 1974–75. In developing subsequent missions to Mercury, such as the U.S. Messenger spacecraft launched in 2004, spaceflight engineers calculated complex routes, making use of gravity assists (see spaceflight: Planetary flights) from repeated flybys of Venus and Mercury over the course of several years. In the Messenger mission design, after conducting observations from moderate distances during planetary flybys in 2008 and 2009, the spacecraft entered into an elongated orbit around Mercury for close-up investigations in 2011. In addition, the extreme heat, not only from the Sun but also reradiated from Mercury itself, has challenged spacecraft designers to keep instruments cool enough to operate.

Orbital and rotational effects

Mercury’s orbit is the most inclined of the planets, tilting about 7° from the ecliptic, the plane defined by the orbit of Earth around the Sun; it is also the most eccentric, or elongated planetary orbit. As a result of the elongated orbit, the Sun appears more than twice as bright in Mercury’s sky when the planet is closest to the Sun (at perihelion), at 46 million km (29 million miles), than when it is farthest from the Sun (at aphelion), at nearly 70 million km (43 million miles). The planet’s rotation period of 58.6 Earth days with respect to the stars—i.e., the length of its sidereal day—causes the Sun to drift slowly westward in Mercury’s sky. Because Mercury is also orbiting the Sun, its rotation and revolution periods combine such that the Sun takes three Mercurian sidereal days, or 176 Earth days, to make a full circuit—the length of its solar day.

As described by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Mercury travels around the Sun so swiftly near perihelion that the Sun appears to reverse course in Mercury’s sky, briefly moving eastward before resuming its westerly advance. The two locations on Mercury’s equator where this oscillation takes place at noon are called hot poles. As the overhead Sun lingers there, heating them preferentially, surface temperatures can exceed 700 kelvins (K; 800 °F, 430 °C). The two equatorial locations 90° from the hot poles, called warm poles, never get nearly as hot. From the perspective of the warm poles, the Sun is already low on the horizon and about to set when it grows the brightest and performs its brief course reversal. Near the north and south rotational poles of Mercury, ground temperatures are even colder, below 200 K (−100 °F, −70 °C), when lit by grazing sunlight. Surface temperatures drop to about 90 K (−300 °F, −180 °C) during Mercury’s long nights before sunrise.

Mercury’s temperature range is the most extreme of the solar system’s four inner, terrestrial planets, but the planet’s nightside would be even colder if Mercury kept one face perpetually toward the Sun and the other in perpetual darkness. Until Earth-based radar observations proved otherwise in the 1960s, astronomers had long believed that to be the case, which would follow if Mercury’s rotation were synchronous—that is, if its rotation period were the same as its 88-day revolution period. Telescopic observers, limited to viewing Mercury periodically under conditions dictated by Mercury’s angular distance from the Sun, had been misled into concluding that their seeing the same barely distinguishable features on Mercury’s surface on each viewing occasion indicated a synchronous rotation. The radar studies revealed that the planet’s 58.6-day rotation period is not only different from its orbital period but also exactly two-thirds of it.

Mercury’s orbital eccentricity and the strong solar tides—deformations raised in the body of the planet by the Sun’s gravitational attraction—apparently explain why the planet rotates three times for every two times that it orbits the Sun. Mercury presumably had spun faster when it was forming, but it was slowed by tidal forces. Instead of slowing to a state of synchronous rotation, as has happened to many planetary satellites, including Earth’s Moon, Mercury became trapped at the 58.6-day rotation rate. At this rate the Sun tugs repeatedly and especially strongly on the tidally induced bulges in Mercury’s crust at the hot poles. The chances of trapping the spin at the 58.6-day period were greatly enhanced by tidal friction between the solid mantle and molten core of the young planet.

Mercury in tests of relativity

Mercury’s orbital motion has played an important role in the development and testing of theories of the nature of gravity because it is perturbed by the gravitational pull of the Sun and the other planets. The effect appears as a gyration, or precession, of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. This small motion, about 9.5′ (0.16°) of arc per century, has been known for two centuries, and, in fact, all but about 7 percent of it—corresponding to 43″ (0.012°) of arc—could be explained by the theory of gravity proposed by Isaac Newton. The discrepancy was too large to ignore, however, and explanations were offered, usually invoking as-yet-undiscovered planets within Mercury’s orbit. In 1915 Albert Einstein showed that the treatment of gravity in his general theory of relativity could explain the small discrepancy. Thus, the precession of Mercury’s orbit became an important observational verification of Einstein’s theory.

Mercury was subsequently employed in additional tests of relativity, which made use of the fact that radar signals that are reflected from its surface when it is on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth (at superior conjunction) must pass close to the Sun. The general theory of relativity predicts that such electromagnetic signals, moving in the warped space caused by the Sun’s immense gravity, will follow a slightly different path and take a slightly different time to traverse that space than if the Sun were absent. By comparing reflected radar signals with the specific predictions of the general theory, scientists achieved a second important confirmation of relativity.

Mariner 10, radar, and Messenger

Scientific knowledge about Mercury was greatly increased by the three flybys of Mariner 10. Because the spacecraft was placed in an orbit around the Sun equal to one Mercurian solar day, it made each of its three passes when exactly the same half of the planet was in sunlight. Slightly less than the illuminated half, or about 45 percent of Mercury’s surface, was eventually imaged. Mariner 10 also collected data on particles and magnetic fields during its flybys, which included two close nightside encounters and one distant dayside pass. Mercury was discovered to have a surprisingly Earth-like (though much weaker) magnetic field (see geomagnetic field). Scientists had not anticipated a planetary magnetic field for such a small, slowly rotating body because the dynamo theories that described the phenomenon required thoroughly molten cores and rather rapid planetary spins. Even more rapidly spinning bodies such as the Moon and Mars lack magnetic fields. In addition, Mariner 10’s spectral measurements showed that Mercury has an extremely tenuous atmosphere.

The first significant telescopic data about Mercury after the Mariner mission resulted in the discovery in the mid-1980s of sodium in the atmosphere. Subsequently, better Earth-based techniques enabled the variations of several of Mercury’s atmospheric components to be studied from place to place and over time. Also, ongoing improvement in the power and sensitivity of ground-based radar resulted in intriguing maps of the hemisphere unseen by Mariner 10 and, in particular, the discovery of condensed material, probably water ice, in permanently shadowed craters near the poles.

In 2008 the Messenger probe made its first flyby of Mercury and obtained photos of more than a third of the hemisphere that had been unseen by Mariner 10. The probe passed within 200 km (120 miles) of the planet’s surface and saw many previously unknown geologic features. In 2011 Messenger entered Mercury’s orbit and began a one-year study. Messenger’s mission was extended in 2012, and that same year it confirmed that the condensed material in permanently shadowed craters near the north pole was water ice covered by a layer of dark organic compounds.

The atmosphere

A planet as small and as hot as Mercury has no possibility of retaining a significant atmosphere, if it ever had one. To be sure, Mercury’s surface pressure is less than one-trillionth that of Earth. Nevertheless, the traces of atmospheric components that have been detected have provided clues about interesting planetary processes. Mariner 10 found small amounts of atomic helium and even smaller amounts of atomic hydrogen near Mercury’s surface. These atoms are mostly derived from the solar wind—the flow of charged particles from the Sun that expands outward through the solar system—and remain near Mercury’s surface for very short times, perhaps only hours, before escaping the planet. Mariner also detected atomic oxygen, which, along with sodium, potassium, and calcium, discovered subsequently in telescopic observations, is probably derived from Mercury’s surface soils or impacting meteoroids and ejected into the atmosphere either by the impacts or by bombardment of solar wind particles. The atmospheric gases tend to accumulate on Mercury’s nightside but are dissipated by the brilliant morning sunlight.

Many atoms in Mercury’s surface rocks and in its tenuous atmosphere become ionized when struck by energetic particles in the solar wind and in Mercury’s magnetosphere. Unlike Mariner 10, the Messenger spacecraft has instruments that can measure ions. During Messenger’s first flyby of Mercury in 2008, many ions were identified, including those of oxygen, sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, and sulfur. In addition, another instrument mapped Mercury’s long cometlike tail, which is prominently visible in the spectral emission lines of sodium.

Although the measured abundances of sodium and potassium are extremely low—from hundreds to a few tens of thousands of atoms per cubic centimetre near the surface—telescopic spectral instruments are very sensitive to these two elements, and astronomers can watch thicker patches of these gases move across Mercury’s disk and through its neighbourhood in space. Presumably many other gases that are harder to detect are present in similar minuscule quantities, and some of these gases are likely to be detected and mapped as the Messenger mission continues. Where these gases come from and go was primarily of theoretical, rather than practical, importance until the early 1990s. At that time Earth-based radar made the remarkable discovery of patches of highly radar-reflective materials at the poles. Messenger later observed that the patches were only in made of water ice. Despite Mercury’s proximity to the Sun, the water ice was able to survive by being covered in an insulating layer of dark organic material in permanently shadowed regions of deep , near-polar craters, which is consistent with the reflecting material’s being water ice.

The idea that the planet nearest the Sun might harbour significant deposits of water ice originally seemed bizarre. Yet, Mercury must have has accumulated water over its history—for examplehistory, most likely from impacting comets and asteroids. Water ice on Mercury’s broiling surface will immediately turn to vapour (sublime), and the individual water molecules will hop, in random directions, along ballistic trajectories. The odds are very poor that a water molecule will strike another atom in Mercury’s atmosphere, although there is some chance that it will be dissociated by the bright sunlight. Calculations suggest that after many hops perhaps 1 out of 10 water molecules eventually lands in a deep polar depression. Because Mercury’s rotational axis is essentially perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, sunlight is always nearly horizontal at the poles. Under such conditions the bottoms of deep depressions would remain in permanent shadow and provide cold traps that could hold water molecules for millions or billions of years. Gradually a polar ice deposit would build builds up. The susceptibility of the ice to subliming away slowly—e.g., from the slight warmth of sunlight reflected from distant mountains or crater rims—could be rims—is reduced if because it gradually became is cloaked by an insulating debris layer, or regolith, made of dust and rock fragments ejected from distant impacts. Radar data suggest that the reflecting layer indeed is covered with as much as 0.5 metre (1.6 feet) of such debris.

It is far from certain that the volatile material near Mercury’s poles is water ice. Studies with Messenger found small patches of high reflectivity in craters at latitudes as low as 67°, where water ice would be far less likely to form and survive. Perhaps another easily evaporated substance, but one less volatile than water, has been “cold-trapped” on Mercury. One candidate, atomic sulfur, is fairly abundant in the cosmos and, for other reasons, may be especially abundant on and within Mercury. (Sulfur’s possible role in the generation of the planet’s magnetic field is discussed in the section Origin and evolution.)

about 10–20 cm (4–8 inches) thick, made of organic compounds that also arrived on Mercury in cometary and asteroidal impacts.

The magnetic field and magnetosphere

As closely as Mariner 10’s measurements could determine, Mercury’s magnetic field, though only 1 percent as strong as Earth’s, resembles Earth’s field (see geomagnetic field) in being roughly dipolar and oriented along the planet’s axis of rotation. While the existence of the field might conceivably have some other explanation—such as, for example, remanent magnetism, the retained imprint of an ancient magnetic field frozen into the rocks during crustal cooling—most researchers became convinced that it is produced, like Earth’s field, by a magnetohydrodynamic dynamo mechanism (see dynamo theory) involving motions within an electrically conducting fluid in the outer portions of Mercury’s iron-sulfur core. Measurements by Messenger’s magnetometer, made during the spacecraft’s first flyby in January 2008, confirm that Mercury’s magnetic field is basically dipolar. They fail to reveal any crustal contributions that might be expected from remanent magnetism, so it seems clear that Mercury’s dynamo is currently operating.

Mercury’s magnetic field holds off the solar wind with a teardrop-shaped bubble, or magnetosphere, whose rounded end extends outward toward the Sun about one planetary radius from the surface. This is only about 5 percent of the sunward extent of Earth’s magnetosphere. The planet’s atmosphere is so thin that no equivalent to Earth’s ionosphere exists at Mercury. Indeed, calculations suggest that on occasion the solar wind is strong enough to push the sunward boundary (magnetopause) of the magnetosphere beneath Mercury’s surface. Under these conditions solar wind ions would impinge directly on those portions of Mercury’s surface immediately beneath the Sun. Even infrequent occurrences of such an event could dramatically alter the atomic composition of surface constituents. Preliminary measurements by Messenger suggest that Mercury’s magnetosphere may have an unusual configuration, a kind of double magnetopause, perhaps due to the abundance of heavy ions, primarily sodium, that come from Mercury’s surface and atmosphere.

Mercury’s magnetospheric processes are of interest to geophysicists and space scientists, who hope one day to test their conception of Earth’s magnetosphere through examination of an Earth-like field with a very different scale and in a different solar wind environment. For example, Mariner 10 instruments recorded rapidly varying energetic particles in the planet’s magnetotail, the elongated portion of the magnetosphere downstream from the planet’s nightside; this activity was much like the geomagnetic substorms on Earth (see magnetic storm) that are associated with auroral displays. The origin of such events on Earth may be more directly understood from comprehensive global data that will be gathered by Messenger.

Character of the surface

The portions of Mercury imaged by Mariner 10 and Messenger look superficially like the Moon. Mercury is heavily pockmarked with impact craters of all sizes. The smallest craters visible in the highest-resolution Mariner photos are a few hundred metres in diameter. Interspersed among the larger craters are relatively flat, less-cratered regions termed intercrater plains. These are similar to but much more pervasive than the light-coloured plains that occupy intercrater areas on the heavily cratered highlands of the Moon. There are also some sparsely cratered regions called smooth plains, many of which surround the most prominent impact structure on Mercury, the immense impact basin known as Caloris, only half of which was in sunlight during the Mariner 10 encounters but which was fully revealed by Messenger during its first flyby of Mercury in January 2008.

Impact craters

The most common topographic features on Mercury are the craters that cover much of its surface. Although lunarlike in general appearance, Mercurian craters show interesting differences when studied in detail.

Mercury’s surface gravity is more than twice that of the Moon, partly because of the great density of the planet’s huge iron-sulfur core. The higher gravity tends to keep material ejected from a crater from traveling as far—only 65 percent of the distance that would be reached on the Moon. This may be one factor that contributes to the prominence on Mercury of secondary craters—those craters made by impact of the ejected material, as distinct from primary craters formed directly by asteroid or comet impacts. The higher gravity also means that the complex forms and structures characteristic of larger craters—central peaks, slumped crater walls, and flattened floors—occur in smaller craters on Mercury (minimum diameters of about 10 km [6 miles]) than on the Moon (about 19 km [12 miles]). Craters smaller than these minimums have simple bowl shapes. Mercury’s craters also show differences from those on Mars, although the two planets have comparable surface gravities. Fresh craters tend to be deeper on Mercury than craters of the same size on Mars; this may be because of a lower content of volatile materials in the Mercurian crust or higher impact velocities on Mercury (since the velocity of an object in solar orbit increases with its nearness to the Sun).

Craters on Mercury larger than about 100 km (60 miles) in diameter begin to show features indicative of a transition to the “bull’s-eye” form that is the hallmark of the largest impact basins. These latter structures, called multiring basins and measuring 300 km (200 miles) or more across, are products of the most energetic impacts. Several dozen multiring basins were tentatively recognized on the imaged portion of Mercury; new Messenger images and laser altimetry will greatly contribute to the understanding of these remnant scars from early asteroidal bombardment of Mercury.

Caloris

Basin and surrounding region

The ramparts of the Caloris impact basin span a diameter of about 1,550 km (960 miles). (Estimates of its size from the part of Caloris seen by Mariner 10 were considerably smaller.) Its interior is occupied by smooth plains that are extensively ridged and fractured in a prominent radial and concentric pattern. The largest ridges are a few hundred kilometres long, about 3 km (2 miles) wide, and less than 300 metres (1,000 feet) high. More than 200 fractures that are comparable to the ridges in size radiate from the centre of Caloris; many are depressions bounded by faults (grabens). Where grabens cross ridges, they usually cut through them, implying that the grabens formed later than the ridges.

Two types of terrain surround Caloris—the basin rim and the basin ejecta terrains. The rim consists of a ring of irregular mountain blocks approaching 3 km (2 miles) in height, the highest mountains yet seen on Mercury, bounded on the interior by a relatively steep slope, or escarpment. A second, much smaller escarpment ring stands about 100–150 km (60–90 miles) beyond the first. Smooth plains occupy the depressions between mountain blocks. Beyond the outer escarpment is a zone of linear, radial ridges and valleys that are partially filled by plains, some with numerous knobs and hills only a few hundred metres across. The origin of these plains, which form a broad annulus surrounding the basin, has been controversial. Some plains on the Moon were formed primarily by interaction of basin ejecta with the preexisting surface at the time a basin formed, and this may also have been the case on Mercury. But the Messenger results suggest a prominent role for volcanism in forming many of these plains. Not only are they sparsely cratered, compared with the interior plains of Caloris, indicating a protracted period of plains formation in the annulus, but they show other traits more clearly associated with volcanism than could be seen on Mariner 10 images. Decisive evidence of volcanism was provided by Messenger images showing actual volcanic vents, many of which are distributed along the outer edge of Caloris.

Caloris is one of the youngest of the large multiring basins, at least on the observed portion of Mercury. It probably was formed at the same time as the last giant basins on the Moon, about 3.9 billion years ago. Messenger images revealed another, much smaller basin with a prominent interior ring that may have formed much more recently (it was named Raditladi).

The antipodal region

On the other side of the planet, exactly 180° opposite Caloris, is a region of weirdly contorted terrain. It is interpreted to have been formed at the same time as the Caloris impact by the focusing of seismic waves from that event to the antipodal area on Mercury’s surface. Termed hilly and lineated terrain, it is an extensive area of elevations and depressions. The crudely polygonal hills are 5–10 km (3–6 miles) wide and up to 1.5 km (1 mile) high. Preexisting crater rims have been disrupted into hills and fractures by the seismic process that created the terrain. Some of these craters have smooth floors that have not been disrupted, which suggests a later infilling of material. Once Messenger has mapped the entire globe of Mercury, a thorough search can be made for similarly disrupted terrain antipodal to other large basins on Mercury.

Plains

Plains—relatively flat or smoothly undulating surfaces—are ubiquitous on Mercury and the other terrestrial planets. They represent a canvas on which other landforms develop. The covering or destruction of a rough topography and the creation of a smoother surface is called resurfacing, and plains are evidence of this process.

There are at least three ways that planets are resurfaced, and all three may have had a role in creating Mercury’s plains. One way, raising the temperature, reduces the strength of the crust and its ability to retain high relief; over millions of years the mountains sink and the crater floors rise. A second way involves the flow of material toward lower elevations under the influence of gravity; the material eventually collects in depressions and fills to higher levels as more volume is added. Flows of lava from the interior behave in this manner. A third way is for fragments of material to be deposited on a surface from above, first mantling and eventually obliterating the rough topography. Blanketing by impact crater ejecta and by volcanic ash are examples of this mechanism.

Some of the evidence tilting toward the volcanism hypothesis for the formation of many of the plains surrounding Caloris has already been described. Other comparatively youthful plains on Mercury, which were especially prominent in regions illuminated by a low Sun during Messenger’s first flyby, show prominent features of volcanism. For example, several older craters appear to have been “filled to the brim” by lava flows, very much like lava-filled craters on the Moon and Mars. However, the widespread intercrater plains on Mercury are more difficult to evaluate. Since they are older, any obvious volcanoes or other volcanic features may have been eroded or otherwise obliterated, making a definitive determination more difficult. Understanding these older plains is important, since they seem to be implicated in erasing a larger fraction of craters 10–30 km (6–20 miles) in diameter on Mercury as compared with the Moon.

Scarps

The most important landforms on Mercury for gaining insight into the planet’s otherwise largely unseen interior workings have been its hundreds of lobate scarps. These cliffs vary from tens to over a thousand kilometres in length and from about 100 metres (330 feet) to 3 km (2 miles) in altitude. Viewed from above, they have curved or scalloped edges, hence the term lobate. It is clear that they were formed from fracturing, or faulting, when one portion of the surface was thrust up and overrode the adjacent terrain. On Earth such thrust faults are limited in extent and result from local horizontal compressive (squeezing) forces in the crust. On Mercury, however, these features range across all of the surface that has been imaged so far, which implies that Mercury’s crust must have contracted globally in the past. From the numbers and geometries of the lobate scarps, it appears that the planet shrank in diameter by at least 3 km (2 miles).

Moreover, the shrinkage must have continued until comparatively recently in Mercury’s geologic history—that is, since the time Caloris formed—because some lobate scarps have altered the shapes of some fresh-appearing (hence comparatively young) impact craters. The slowing of the planet’s initial high rotation rate by tidal forces (see above Orbital and rotational effects) would have produced compression in Mercury’s equatorial latitudes. The globally distributed lobate scarps, however, suggest another explanation: later cooling of the planet’s mantle, perhaps combined with freezing of part of its once totally molten core, caused the interior to shrink and the cold surface crust to buckle. In fact, the contraction of Mercury estimated from cooling of its mantle should have produced even more compressional features on its surface than have been seen, which suggests that the planet has not finished shrinking.

Surface composition

Scientists have attempted to deduce the makeup of Mercury’s surface from studies of the sunlight reflected from different regions. One of the differences noted between Mercury and the Moon, beyond the fact that Mercury is on average somewhat darker than the Moon, is that the range of surface brightnesses is narrower on Mercury. For example, the Moon’s maria—the smooth plains visible as large dark patches to the unaided eye—are much darker than its cratered highlands, whereas Mercury’s plains are at most only slightly darker than its cratered terrains. Colour differences across Mercury are also less pronounced than on the Moon, although Messenger images taken through a set of colour filters have revealed some small patches, many associated with volcanic vents, that are quite colourful. These attributes of Mercury, as well as the relatively featureless visible and near-infrared spectrum of its reflected sunlight, suggest that the planet’s surface is lacking in iron- and titanium-rich silicate minerals, which are darker in colour, compared with the lunar maria. In particular, Mercury’s rocks may be low in oxidized iron (FeO), and this leads to speculation that the planet was formed in conditions much more reducing—i.e., those in which oxygen was scarce—than other terrestrial planets.

Determination of the composition of Mercury’s surface from such remote-sensing data involving reflected sunlight and the spectrum of Mercury’s emitted thermal radiation is fraught with difficulties. For instance, strong radiation from the nearby Sun modifies the optical properties of mineral grains on Mercury’s surface, rendering straightforward interpretations difficult. However, Messenger is equipped with several instruments, which were not aboard Mariner 10, that can measure chemical and mineral compositions directly. These instruments need to observe Mercury for long periods of time while the spacecraft remains near Mercury, so there were no definitive results from Messenger’s three early and brief flybys of the planet. During Messenger’s mission in orbit around Mercury there will be abundant new information about the composition of the planet’s surface.

Origin and evolution

Mercury’s formation

Scientists once thought that Mercury’s richness in iron compared with the other terrestrial planets’ could be explained by its accretion from objects made up of materials derived from the extremely hot inner region of the solar nebula, where only substances with high freezing temperatures could solidify. The more volatile elements and compounds would not have condensed so close to the Sun. Modern theories of the formation of the solar system, however, discount the possibility that an orderly process of accretion led to progressive detailed differences in planetary chemistry with distance from the Sun. Rather, the components of the bodies that accreted into Mercury likely were derived from a wide part of the inner solar system. Indeed, Mercury itself may have formed anywhere from the asteroid belt inward; subsequent gravitational interactions among the many growing protoplanets could have moved Mercury around.

Some planetary scientists have suggested that during Mercury’s early epochs, after it had already differentiated (chemically separated) into a less-dense crust and mantle of silicate rocks and a denser iron-rich core, a giant collision stripped away much of the planet’s outer layers, leaving a body dominated by its core. This event would have been similar to the collision of a Mars-sized object with Earth that is thought to have formed the Moon (see Moon: Origin and evolution).

Nevertheless, such violent, disorderly planetary beginnings would not necessarily have placed the inherently densest planet closest to the Sun. Other processes may have been primarily responsible for Mercury’s high density. Perhaps the materials that eventually formed Mercury experienced a preferential sorting of heavier metallic particles from lighter silicate ones because of aerodynamic drag by the gaseous solar nebula. Perhaps, because of the planet’s nearness to the hot early Sun, its silicates were preferentially vaporized and lost. Each of these scenarios predicts different bulk chemistries for Mercury. In addition, infalling asteroids, meteoroids, and comets and implantation of solar wind particles have been augmenting or modifying the surface and near-surface materials on Mercury for billions of years. Because these materials are the ones most readily analyzed by telescopes and spacecraft, the task of extrapolating backward in time to an understanding of ancient Mercury, and the processes that subsequently shaped it, is formidable.

Later development

Planetary scientists continue to puzzle over the ages of the major geologic and geophysical events that took place on Mercury after its formation. On the one hand, it is tempting to model the planet’s history after that of the Moon, whose chronology has been accurately dated from the rocks returned by the U.S. Apollo manned landings and Soviet Luna robotic missions. By analogy, Mercury would have had a similar history, but one in which the planet cooled off and became geologically inactive shortly after the Caloris impact rather than experiencing persistent volcanism for hundreds of millions of years, as did the Moon. On the presumption that Mercury’s craters were produced by the same populations of remnant planetary building blocks (planetesimals), asteroids, and comets that struck the Moon, most of the craters would have formed before and during an especially intense period of bombardment in the inner solar system, which on the Moon is well documented to have ended about 3.8 billion years ago. Caloris presumably would have formed about that time, representing the final chapter in Mercury’s geologic history, apart from occasional cratering.

On the other hand, there are many indications that Mercury is very much geologically alive even today. Its dipolar field seems to require a core that is still at least partially molten in order to sustain the magnetohydrodynamic dynamo. Indeed, recent measurements of Mercury’s gravitational field by Messenger have been interpreted as proving that at least the outer core is still molten. In addition, as suggested above, Mercury’s scarps show evidence that the planet may not have completed its cooling and shrinking.

There are several approaches to resolving this apparent contradiction between a planet that died geologically before the Moon did and one that is still alive. One hypothesis is that most of Mercury’s craters are younger than those on the Moon, having been formed by impacts from so-called vulcanoids—the name bestowed on a hypothetical remnant population of asteroid-sized objects orbiting the Sun inside Mercury’s orbit—that would have cratered Mercury over the planet’s age. In this case Caloris, the lobate scarps, and other features would be much younger than 3.8 billion years, and Mercury could be viewed as a planet whose surface has only recently become inactive and whose warm interior is still cooling down. No vulcanoids have yet been discovered, however, despite a number of searches for them. Moreover, objects orbiting the Sun so closely and having such high relative velocities could well have been broken up in catastrophic collisions with each other long ago.

A more likely solution to Mercury’s thermal conundrum is that the outer shell of Mercury’s iron core remains molten because of contamination, for instance, with a small proportion of sulfur, which would lower the melting point of the metal, and of radioactive potassium, which would augment production of heat. Also, the planet’s interior may have cooled more slowly than previously calculated as a result of restricted heat transfer. Perhaps the contraction of the planet’s crust, so evident about the time of formation of Caloris, pinched off the volcanic vents that had yielded such prolific volcanism earlier in Mercury’s history. In this scenario, despite present-day Mercury’s lingering internal warmth and churnings, surface activity ceased long ago, with the possible exception of a few thrust faults as the planet continues slowly to contract.